Nineteen

It's hard times befallen
The Soul Survivors
She thinks I'm crazy
But I'm just growing old
--Steely Dan

For those unaware, the nineteen in COVID-19 stands for the year when the first case of this particular strain of coronavirus was detected. The first reported case in Wuhan, China was mid-November of last year, which suggests the virus was circulating freely for at least a week or more in the locality--given its incubation period and asymptomatic nature.

Back in March, bio-medicine folks at Stanford suggested that the virus entered the US far before the first reported domestic case in mid-January. After all, they observed, "tens of thousands of people travelled from Wuhan to the US in December." Assuming that the virus was highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubled roughly every three days, the researchers estimated that "an epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected."

The bio docs proceeded to argue that those high infection levels, if accurate, would have translated into a much lower COVID-19 mortality rate than what was being reported.

Not surprisingly, officials dismissed their logic, and stuck to the narrative that there was no chance that infection rates were that high that early in the US.

However, evidence continues to grow that the Stanford folks were on the mark. Sero-antibody studies have revealed that COVID infection levels are orders of magnitude higher than official counts. In fact, some people who have tested positive in serology studies, like these people from the Seattle area, are claiming that they displayed clinical symptoms of the virus in December. My sense is that we'll hear more of these stories.

It seems quite likely that the virus was circulating in the US for months before things were shut down. And that the virus has come and gone in tens of millions.